Facebook talks about Home’s privacy and data collection activities

So, Facebook Home has finally become official and it will be available for download on the 12thof this month. And if everything goes according to the company’s calculations, millions of people will be downloading the app and will use it as the default launched on their Android smart phones. But an app like that, and especially Facebook, will be able to collect a lot of user data, and that is a very big concern for many people, and rightly so. So there have been many questions about the privacy surrounding the new Facebook Home app. And Facebook has answered all these questions in a blog post today.

According to the blog post, the Facebook Home app will be collecting all the data that the Facebook app is already collecting from a user’s Android smart phone or tablet. But along with that, the Facebook Home app will be collecting some more user data as it is the launcher in this case. The app will be able to log the apps which you install and open, and use this data. But the company says that once you open an app, the Facebook Home app will log that you opened a particular app, but it will not be collecting or logging any of the data from inside the app. For example, if you open Google Maps, Facebook Home will log this. But it will not log what you search or look at inside Google Maps.

Also, the Facebook Home will be able to log all your notifications. The launcher will, for example, understand that you got an email and the Gmail app put out a notification for that. But it will not be logging what your email contains or from whom it is. And the company also says that any kind of data that the app collects will be deleted in 90 days.

But according to my opinion, all these facts are not going to stop a lot of people from downloading and installing the Facebook Home app. Even though you get the option to control all these, this is what almost all launcher apps may be doing, but we never know.

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